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Sitecore introduced MongoDB in it’s ecosystem to solve the problem of scaling analytics, let’s try to understand MongoDB from Sitecore prespective, and see how it’s useful and where exactly it sit in the Sitecore system, we will have series of three posts where we will start with the introduction about it, it’s features, advantages, setting up MongoDB in your environment.

In the second series we will talk about contacts and some of the out of the box queries, and will to understand MongoDB collection, and in the final post we will see how we can create custom facets to extend MongoDB functionality.

Introduction to MongoDB

Sitecore 7.5 introduced MongoDB as the main datastore for the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB). Sitecore xDB allows organizations to collect all of their customer interactions from all channels to create a comprehensive, single view of the customer that allows marketers to better optimize the customer experience in real-time.

Following are some of the features of MongoDB:

Open source

NoSQL

Document oriented database.

Primarily used for collecting data and information about visitors(for analytics)

Visitors and their interactions are written to MongoDB in JSON format, which then processed by an aggregation pipeline into a format that is used for reporting.

There are several advantages and benefits with MongoDB, some of them are listed below:

Scalability

Standalone environment

Vertical Scaling and

Horizontal Scaling

Performance

Flexibility

Unstructured data and Schemas

Scaling is one of the critical feature in Sitecore, and we will discuss about all different scaling options in the next series of this post, where we will talk more about horizontal scaling and how MongoDB uses it to make sure the availability of data.